That twin logic also should guide anyone (or any institution) investing in fossil fuels, McBride, 37, recently told the Burlington Free Press: “It makes sense from a moral perspective, as well as from a financial perspective.”

Just as smoke-related health problems help us calculate tobacco’s true cost, the value of coal, oil and gas — and particularly of their freight of greenhouse gases — should plummet as we assess collateral damage to our economies, the South Burlington resident added.

“By divesting from the fossil-fuel industry, we’re stating what we think their huge reserves are worth,” McBride said. “They’re becoming worthless. So let’s not invest in companies that are wrecking the planet.”

Numbers

McBride’s views are widely shared and widely debated, particularly in the wake of an enormously popular article in the Aug. 2 issue of Rolling Stone magazine: “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

Written by 350.org co-founder (and Middlebury scholar-in-residence) Bill McKibben, the piece describes in quantitative terms how quickly and how severely we can expect fossil-fuel emissions to thoroughly disrupt life on Earth.

McKibben, who had hatched 350.org on the Middlebury campus in 2008, explains in the “New Math” article why students might be best suited to lead divestment campaigns: “If their college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.”

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Tougher math?

In November, 350.org launched its “Do the Math” bus tour of venues across the country, including many college campuses.

Local organizing has flourished in the tour’s aftermath — and so has a crop of criticism.

One month into 350.org’s’s biofuel-fueled barnstorm, Cary Krosinsky, who teaches sustainability and investing at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, praised the campaign’s raising of public climate-awareness, but faulted the tight focus of its economic strategy.

Divestment from large fossil-fuel companies “might get some notice,” he wrote in a Nov. 27 blog for GreenBiz.com, “but what about companies in the oil services sector, such as drillers and transporters: Are they off the hook? How about companies that use oil and gas? Should we divest from them as well?”

A look at the books

Cautious by nature, institutional investors have been hesitant about pulling money from stocks that have so far proven to be “strong performing.”

But there are signs that campus activism for divestment will extend to faculty and administrations, as it did in the 1980s during campaigns against the South African apartheid regime.

In December, Unity College in Unity, Maine, made headlines for divesting from fossil-fuel corporations.

At least three other colleges — Sterling College (in Craftsbury), Hampshire (Amherst, Mass.) and College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, Maine) — have followed suit.